


He, First of Men, With Awful Wing

by akathecentimetre



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: AU madness, Arthurian legend - Freeform, Cornwall, Drift Compatibility, F/M, Gen, Magic, Post-Apocalypse, The Drift (Pacific Rim)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-01
Updated: 2018-04-01
Packaged: 2019-04-16 17:55:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14170374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre
Summary: Joining the jaeger corps had been a long-shot to begin with, as was saving the world (again) in general; being told that your drift compatibility was sky-high with a heroic veteran of the Battle of Scilly was quite another kettle of fish.Peter Grant has lived his whole life for this.





	He, First of Men, With Awful Wing

**Author's Note:**

> I have no clue what I'm doing. Blame [AgarthanGuide.](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/pseuds/AgarthanGuide)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _The breach first emerged in the Sargasso Sea. The world's defense and wall-building systems are based around the Atlantic basin, concentrated at New York, Barbados, Recife, Penzance, Gibraltar, Dakar, and Luanda._
> 
> _The year is 2040._   
> 

*

The train stopped in Plymouth, which, given that it was a special military transport in a classified defence zone, wasn’t supposed to happen. Beside me, Lesley broke off her snoring with a cough, rubbed her nose briefly into my shoulder, and then yawned, blinking out of the window.

“We there yet?”

“Nowhere near.”

“Why’d we stop?” she said, irritated, and I was just on edge enough that it took effort to remind myself that it wasn’t me she was anxious over.

“It’s not like you to think I know everything.”

“Fuck off, Grant,” she said, and, coming more fully awake, started peering around the crowded carriage with her sharp eyes. It was a converted Tube car, hardly very comfortable, and packed full of other cadets whose look ranged from alarming excitement to green-gilled nausea. I couldn’t blame most of them, though, given that we were in a place which had been sealed off from the rest of Britain for most of the past two decades – Lesley, too, was starting to go wide-eyed as she looked out at the ruins of the town. The only things left standing had been the railway and half of the station; the rest of it was overgrown, bricks and concrete torn through with tough, prickling weeds.

“Shit,” Lesley breathed. “It’s still this bad?”

“Readings are still at 9.8 PPM of kaiju blue. Well over the levels deemed safe for continued habitation.”

“Swot,” Lesley said absently, still preoccupied. She had her hand on my knee, which was distracting, but the strength of feeling in her fingers made it most likely she wasn’t conscious of doing it.

A set of doors slid creakily open at the end of the carriage, and a cadet who’d ignored the usual advice about not leaning against them tumbled, cursing, out into the gloom. He was replaced by a bored-looking staff officer, who, in an equally bored tone of voice, called out –

“Cadet Grant, report.”

Lesley followed me along the carriage, rabidly curious, stepping neatly over pairs of boots as the sleepy crowd didn’t bother to get out of our way. “Sir?”

“Grab your dunnage, you’re going for a little ride,” the officer said; he was Air Force, and looked skeptical as he glanced me up and down, even double-checking his datapad to make sure he’d gotten the right shit-scared incompetent. “You only,” he added, and beside me I heard Lesley deflate into an unfamiliar, tamped-down silence.

“You’d better call,” Lesley said, leaning down to me from the edge of the door, which dropped off several feet onto the cluttered siding. “If you’re not at the shatterdome within a couple of days I’ll put up a stink.”

“No, you won’t,” I said, grinning at the implication that she’d ever do anything to jeopardize the shining new career of heroism she was chasing, and watched her smile tighten. She looked forlorn as I turned and trudged away, though, so maybe I was still in with a chance if we were ever to end up in the same place again.

The Range Rover followed roads I’d never known before – would never have had any chance of knowing – but here and there, there were still signs of the civilization that had been lost. We followed crooked, rusted signs for the A388, the A30, the A395; I was able to tell, as noon passed, that we were headed north and then west. The Cornish villages here had not been destroyed, but had instead been abandoned in the face of the drift of bloodmist. The little high streets, cottages, and gardens were still and silent, with struggling wildflowers attempting to climb walls and spill onto tarmac.

“Am I allowed to ask questions?” I said once, and got only a raised eyebrow from the brass in the front seat in response.

I smelled the sea before we reached it, and then it was abruptly there, and I felt very much like a London fish out of Thames water. We were still miles north of the Penzance shatterdome, but even here there were kaiju bones looming on the edge of the cliffs, stuck like shards of glass through the ruins of a medieval castle that jutted out over the sands. Below them, the ruined town looked like it had been a tourist trap once, all seaside shops and little quaint pubs, now laid open to the sky; as we pulled up on its outskirts, the colonel in the front got out, pulled open my door, and beckoned.

“Down there,” he said, pointing into the shattered main street. “The Vice-Marshal is waiting.”

I’m not going to deny I started to sweat as I set off, clambering as best I could over clumps of fallen stone and rotten thatch. The light was a bit unreal, as it broke in patches and beams through the afternoon clouds; it highlighted the shattered detritus of people’s lives, beach towels and spades and decorative wheelbarrows tipped over in unkempt lawns. The fact that this Vice-Marshal, whomever he was, was at least a dozen ranks above me – fuck, I didn’t even _have_ a rank, I wasn’t anything yet, there was no reason I knew of why I was there – didn’t help a bit.

I found him sitting in the half-demolished remains of what had once been a place which had probably called itself a tea ‘shoppe’ rather than a ‘room.’ He didn’t look much like a vice-marshal in his civilian suit and long overcoat; if anything, I would have pegged him as an old-fashioned film star, his haircut and bearing far more reminiscent of the forties than anything of the jumpsuited, jackbooted, crew-cut severity of the months Lesley and I had spent in our training barracks at RAF Northolt. He was drinking something out of a chipped china cup; for an absurd second I thought he had somehow salvaged a teapot from the wreckage as well before I saw the burnished thermos sitting at his feet.

“Cadet Grant,” he said politely as he saw me; he stood up, even, to shake my hand, and seemed gently amused at my relieved confusion that he didn’t want a salute instead. “Your journey was a quiet one, I trust.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, sitting gingerly opposite him on a listing iron-wrought chair.

He took a moment to pour me a second cup; when that was done, and he had settled back to watch me take a first (excellent) sip, he spoke again. “Do you know who I am?”

“No, sir.”

“Vice-Marshal Thomas Nightingale. The title does not fit the meagre duties I currently undertake, but it was thought appropriate by whomever doles out these ridiculous things.” He tilted his head, and smiled again at my continued ignorance. “I piloted _Newton’s Folly_ , if that is of any help.”

Oh, shit.

Yeah, I knew that name. The British tradition of keeping pilot names classified – ostensibly for security purposes, but really because England had always thought the whole American tradition of pilots as celebrities far too gauche to be tolerated – meant that I may not have known the name Nightingale, but I knew that jaeger. One of the first jaegers, one of the best, the one who’d been chosen to lead the line defending the Channel wall at the greatest clash of the last forty years, the Battle of Scilly. The first jaeger to take down a Category Four; the last British jaeger to be decommissioned after the Lull was confirmed.

I’d been born nine months after Scilly, as had a lot of other twenty-somethings I knew. There was something about the world not coming to an end which had inspired a lot of relieved shagging that year.

“Sir,” I nodded, the prickle of excitement rather than confusion finally starting up on my palms.

“And were you told why you are here?”

“No, sir.” 

Nightingale reached into his coat and pulled out a small folder filled with honest-to-goodness paper, covered in typed forms and little handwritten marginal notes. “I should make clear to you that I objected to holding this meeting,” he began, not looking directly at me as he shuffled briefly through the stack; on top of one of the sheets, I’m sure I caught sight, suddenly, of my name, circled twice. “A persuasive friend managed to convince me to take it.”  
  
“Yes, sir.”

“What can you tell me about your compatibility scores?”

“Not much, sir. They’re usually classified – I only know how I match with my fellow cadets. I was majority-compatible with my friend Cadet May.”

“Yes, Lesley,” Nightingale said, turning a page. “A very impressive candidate. I’ve no doubt she will graduate into the corps’ official ranks.”

I smiled; I couldn’t help it. “Thank you, sir.”

Nightingale gave me a sharp look, then. “Your resume is varied, Cadet Grant. Good GCSEs, good A-levels, and then dropping out of your course in architecture. Hendon – high scores, low reputation for consistency. Mixed record at RAF Northolt. You have improved in purpose, perhaps, but not in application.”

“No, sir,” I said, my gut sinking.

Nightingale paused, and looked at me frankly; within a moment, he had closed the folder and folding both hands over the end of a walking cane he had had propped by him, covering its silver head. “So why are you here, Peter Grant, at King Arthur’s seat, wanting to pilot a jaeger?” he asked gently.

I thought about it. Briefly. I’d rehearsed it all in my head dozens of times, after all, for my own benefit as well as anyone else’s. It was idiotic drivel about wanting to help, about wanting to do a job, about knowing that the torch had been passed, that the previous generation of heroes – Nightingale’s generation, I realized now – were mostly dead, and the kaiju with them, and that now a new generation had to stand up to the new surge.

“Because I think I’d learn how to be good at it, sir.”

Nightingale looked at me for a long moment before smiling. It was a shrewder look than he’d given me thus far; somewhere in my head my more ambitious self was cheering.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think I agree. Your compatibility scores are most interesting, you see, Cadet Grant. My scientific friends tell me you have a very malleable mind – in fact, you seem to have the rare capacity to suit yourself to most partners that might be put in your path. It is a rare gift, and yet one entirely in keeping with your past endeavours. The task only remains to put you with the pilot best suited to _you_ – which, apparently,” he ended, more slowly, “is me.”

“Um,” I said. I wasn’t feeling very capable of anything in that minute, I can tell you.

“Do you see that?” Nightingale said abruptly, pointing up into the mist. I followed the direction of his finger, and nearly started out of my chair at the sight of the clifftop, and the stern, cloaked figure peering out over it over his sword.

“Shit,” I said, putting down my cup. “Who’s that?”

“No-one’s quite sure,” Nightingale said, gazing up as though he were looking after an old friend. “The sculptor who put him up there in the 2010s called it Gallos, but the tourists tended to call him Arthur. It’s all utter tat, of course. Merlin’s Cave, everything about this place. Monmouth pulled the name Tintagel out of the air because he needed somewhere atmospheric to set Arthur’s birth in his fairy-tale – never mind that Uther raped Igraine.”

There _was_ something moving in the mist, though, and this time my eyes weren’t tricking me. Something huge, looming, dripping seaweed, and it was _loud_ , like the sound of every river in the world rushing into a single waterfall.

“Sir,” I said, and damn it all, my voice was rising and cracking like a frightened child’s, and why wasn’t the coastal alarm system blaring us deaf, and why oh _why_ had the fucking Academy not seen fit to dismantle the ban on cadets having sidearms? “Sir, we need to evacuate.”

“Indubitably,” Nightingale said, calm as glass; he reached over my arm to pick up the thermos. “If, of course, that were a kaiju, which it is not. Look closer, cadet.”

I blinked, took a breath, and looked. And though it _looked_ for all the world like a kaiju in form – the claws of crustaceans, the fish-scales, the half-leather of shark skin, it was all there – the shape looming over us wasn’t luminescent, nor were its eyes the small, evil, pig-like points of destructive desire that I’d seen in all my simulation practice. The water cascading down its sides was still pure and salty, smelling of sea-breezes, and –

– well, it had a pilot. That was a big giveaway. Could she be called a pilot when it was clearly a biological creature? That was a theoretical train of thought for another time.

“Cadet Grant, this is the Lady Britannia,” Nightingale said, and damn him, he was definitely far too amused for this to be fair. “Her steed is Oceanus.”

Fuck me, I thought. Not just kaiju, as if that wasn’t enough. Magic.

Merlin would shit himself.

*

**TBC**

*

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "He, first of men, with awful wing pursu'd  
> The comet through the long elliptic curve,  
> As round innumerous worlds he wound his way,  
> Till, to the forehead of our evening sky  
> Return'd, the blazing wonder glares anew,  
> And o'er the trembling nations shakes dismay."
> 
> \---James Thomson, _A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton_ (1727).


End file.
